How Helly Hansen Boosted Sales Growth with Magento

The outdoor textile brand needed to expand its horizons.

For almost 140 years, Helly Hansen has created professional gear and clothing that helps people stay and feel alive. The brand was established in 1877, when Helly Juell Hansen, a Norwegian sea captain, looked for a better way to stay protected from the harsh Scandinavian climate. Captain Hansen and his wife Margrethe launched a business producing waterproof oilskin jackets, trousers, sou’westers and tarpaulins made from coarse linen soaked in linseed oil – and the legend was born. Today, Helly Hansen gear is worn and trusted by professionals on each of the seven seas; atop the tallest mountains; and on worksites in cities around the globe. But when their legacy eCommerce platform was discontinued, Helly Hansen embarked on a new adventure: to find a new platform that was highly scalable, and just as ambitious.

Helly Hansen needed to keep up with a growing global demand for their products. They knew they needed to expand their digital horizons. They needed to create a digital hub for a seamless shopping experience, and reshape their business to drive growth. Helly Hansen tied their colors to the mast of Magento Commerce: “We needed a platform that would allow us to easily scale and launch our B2C and B2B solutions into new markets, supporting multiple languages and currencies,” said Theodor Tollefsen, Helly Hansen’s eCommerce Manager. “We wanted to create the perfect blend of brand and commerce in order to guide and inspire our customers,” added Tollefson.

“We needed to infuse the customer journey with content and storytelling.” Helly Hansen is organized as several disparate stores for B2B, footwear, and more, so they also wanted to unify all of their sites with the same look and feel. Together with their Magento Solution Partner, Vaimo, they chose Magento Commerce (Cloud) and Magento Order Management (MOM).

“Magento has given us the power to create unique, and engaging customer shopping experience. There are many rich, out-of-the-box features and seamless third-party integrations we can utilize.”

Chris Hammond

Global Digital Director, Helly Hansen

A mobile experience for adventurous customers.

Helly Hansen and Vaimo invested much time and focus into creating a great mobile experience, improving the customer journey, including on-time delivery and returns. They wanted the overall shopping experience to feel highly personalised for every customer. They unified over 30 different Helly Hansen sites with a catalog of 35,000 products per store, each with specific language options, payment methods, shipping rules, localised content, and product availability for 19 countries. Magento Order Management ensures that each order syncs to the correct Helly Hansen fulfilment centre, either in Europe or America.

Helly Hansen’s new user-friendly web store brings the rich heritage of the brand to their customers in a user-friendly way, on any device and channel. Using Vaimo CMS, Helly Hansen created a dynamic brand history, complete with photographs, animations and a scrollable timeline. And for Helly Hansen’s B2B customers, ordering customized clothing has never been easier. “We have a very strong business in providing personalised B2B clothing which is a key part of our growth strategy,” said Tollefsen.

Commerce without limits.

Helly Hansen launched their online store in October of 2016, after an implementation of less than 10 months. “Today we have a solution that allows us to easily break into new markets,” said Tollefsen. “We have 50 different sites with six different language options, payment methods, and shipping rules.” Helly Hansen had gone in search of an eCommerce platform that matched their boundless ambition to break into new markets, and Magento Commerce, said Tollefsen, “delivered all that and more.”

Comparing their site statistics from before their re-platforming project, Helly Hansen was pleased to discover that they had increased traffic by 24 percent, boosted their mobile traffic by 48 percent, and increased their overall revenue by over 45 percent. For a company with a legacy of first-to-market innovations, their digital transformation has left the company ready to thrive in any conditions.